In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Oshetsky explains, “The father and the mother in Chouette aren’t two people at all, the father in the story is me on the days when I frantically searched for the right intervention, the right therapy. This push and pull between mother and father is a fascinating commentary on raising neurodivergent children that speaks to the deeply complex nature of parenthood, and the human desire to be “normal” or belong to an accepted group. Throughout the novel, Tiny’s fierce love and sacrifice for her owl baby are played against the desires of her husband, who keeps searching for treatments or cures for Chouette (whom he incorrectly calls Charlotte). Oshetsky’s novel is a marvel in that it brings in real-world nuance and complexity through this surrealist lens. By keeping the novel strictly confined to the mother-owl dynamic, and leaning into magic of it all, Oshetsky avoids entering into the tropes of the all too common disability-as-horror genre that relies on prejudice and fear of otherness. But nothing can interrupt Tiny’s devotion, as she explains, “Each of us knows from experience that birthing any child is the start of a lifelong terrorization by the very child we love, and yet we mothers are able to bear it because we love our children more than we love our own lives, even as our children blithely seek to destroy us.” I was moved to find out that Oshetsky began this novel as memoir about raising her own daughter, who is autistic, but ultimately saw that fiction was the only way to tell her story while giving adequate space to her daughter and her own story. Tiny maintains a fierce love and protectiveness over her daughter, whose natural inclinations are met with fear and judgment by outsiders. In other words, she behaves in a way that is natural for an owl, but unacceptable in human society.

Mother and daughter spend virtually all of their time together, as Chouette is expelled from school and other treatment programs her father enrolls her in, as she often has outbursts and kills small animals to eat. Tiny’s life becomes consumed with caring for Chouette-she can no longer work, and spends her every waking hour creating the right sort of home for her daughter, cleaning her on a regular schedule, and keeping her fed with frozen dead mice. Tiny’s husband does not believe his wife’s claims that her child will be an owl, but sure enough when she gives birth, her child is a tiny owl whom she names Chouette. The novel begins with the narrator, Tiny, a professional cellist, disclosing that she has had an affair with her owl-lover, a companion from her youth, and she now finds herself pregnant with the fruit of their love, an owl baby. Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette, a fabulist tale of a mother who becomes pregnant with an unusual child, is a fascinating debut that breaks genre conventions of all sorts.

Chouette oshetsky